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Was anyone really surprised when the Conservatives announced this week that Prime Minister Stephen Harper would not be taking part in the traditional TV leaders’ debates during this year’s election?

In any number of ways — well, five ways at least — we should have seen this coming.

1. The broadcast consortium represents the mass media (or what’s left of it). Conservatives, we should realize by now, are not a mass-market party. Harper and his Conservatives have not won three elections with mass appeal, but with micro-targeted appeals to segments of the Canadian populace. Hardly surprising, then, that they have taken this approach to debates as well, eschewing the mass-market format in favour of niche-market events.

At a Canadian Journalism Foundation panel discussion in Ottawa this week, I was arguing that election coverage all too often is still stuck in the 1970s, treating campaigns as efforts to move mass-market opinion — a “national conversation.” Elections sometimes work this way, but increasingly, they have been won as a series of smaller campaigns in target regions.

The news about the TV debates should serve as a jolt to us in the election-coverage business — to take our singular gaze away from the leaders’ horse race exclusively and get better at covering the micro-targeted campaign too.

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2. Conservatives also like to fight elections before the official campaign begins, before they have to deal with those pesky spending rules, level playing fields and such. Again, then, no surprise that they would want to get on with TV debates in the summer, before Harper has even visited the Governor General and dissolved Parliament.

3. The broadcast consortium’s power to set the terms of the leaders’ debates has been increasingly questioned since the last federal election — and not just by Conservatives either. Serious people have been arguing for a while now in favour of an independent panel or commission to handle debates, as is the case in the United States. Just last summer, an even more modest proposal was spearheaded by Bill Fox, former political journalist and adviser to prime minister Brian Mulroney, now a doctor of communications and fellow at Carleton University’s School of Political Management. (Full disclosure: as a fellow and an instructor at the school, I was looped into those discussions, as were a number of veteran politicos from all the main political parties.)

Fox, who has covered TV debates going back to the 1970s and helped leaders prepare for them, suggested to the broadcast consortium that Carleton University could convene some advisory and consultation sessions on the debate format, well in advance of this year’s election. The discussions had barely begun last August when they met a dead end of refusal — “no thanks” from the broadcast consortium.

Even farther back, discussions were also held in Toronto on setting up an independent overseer of the TV debates. Steve Paikin, who has served as moderator of the federal debates, wrote about this initiative in 2013, which came from large-university representatives and civil-society organizations.

4. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but earlier this year, several Conservatives went to Israel to take note of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election. Among the emissaries were Kory Teneycke, Rick Anderson and Jaime Watt, all who have served as spokesmen and defenders of the Conservatives’ stand on debates this week.

Israel, unlike Canada, does not have a tradition of televised leaders’ debates and Netanyahu has been known for his pointed refusal to participate in them, except in very limited circumstances, since the late 1990s. In fact, if you put Netanyahu’s name and “leaders’ debate” into Google, you come up with headlines such as: “Netanyahu agrees to debate — on his terms.”

Sound familiar? We will have to wait, I guess, to see what other tips the Conservatives took from Netanyahu’s election victory.

5. The fifth predictor comes down to what Harper’s critics have been talking about all week in the wake of this announcement — let’s call it his idiosyncratic leadership approach. He likes rules, as long as he’s making them, not so much when others do. (See Supreme Court of Canada rulings, independent watchdogs, etc.) His Conservative candidates have been no-shows at election debates in their ridings for years now, through several elections. And of course, Harper is famously and proudly dismissive of the mainstream media. Add that all up, and what other outcome would we expect when confronted with the mainstream, broadcast media making the rules for the TV debates?

Nearly 10 years since Harper took power, it should be clear to everyone, his fans and critics alike, that this prime minister doesn’t do things simply because they’ve always been done that way. The televised leaders’ debates, as they once were, are now another relic of the political past.

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